Philips Consumer Lifestyle B.V. (PCL)

Our Consumer Lifestyle brand plays a central role to fulfil the needs of consumers worldwide. In this way, we inspire them and make it possible to lead a meaningful life, stay healthy and enjoy life. Consumers worldwide want to improve their own health and wellbeing as well as that of their relatives and families. Philips Consumer Lifestyle wants to grow to become a key player in the area of health and wellbeing by constantly delivering relevant and meaningful innovations. Our key strategic advantage is a combination of our global strong brand, our insights in wishes and needs of people, our extraordinary expertise on technology and design combined with the numerous collaborations with our distribution channels, partners and supply chain. Production is not a goal on its own. Philips delivers intense experiences matching social and emotional needs of our clients in their home situation. We deliver custom solutions aiming at global differences, from a cup of coffee to start the day to a healthy evening meal. Whether we are talking about our sonic technology for best oral care or our innovative laser guided beard trimmer, the innovations that Philips Consumer lifestyle delivers are important for our clients and improve their lives, every day.

Relevant Expertise for the project:

Philips Consumer Lifestyle is world leader in mass production of rotary shaving, occupying over 50% share of a 1.1 billion market. For more than 60 years we have been manufacturing shaving systems in our factory in Drachten. Here we have a highly automated production environment generating large amounts of data. We are the only shaving head manufacturer that applies the ECM process to shaving systems. The characteristics of this process gives us an advantage in shaving performance. However, low cost alternative production processes of the non EU competition are being refined each year, making it essential for PCL to improve on quality, product performance and costs to be able to withstand competition from non EU competitors. During the Mantis project, PCL will make a large amount of production and maintenance data available for development and validation of the Mantis project. The results of this project will reveal critical process parameters relating to maintenance. We have several production lines ready for the results to be implemented on. Ultimately, we gain insights in effective maintenance protocols, better product quality control, including less waste and downtime. This knowledge can be used to be applied to other production processes operated in EU production facilities.

Role in the project:

Philips allows the research partners to use production data for this research

Philips indicates to the research partner the business-relevant maintenance topics

The research partners performs their research aiming to come up with relevant diagnostic rules/predictors.

If the research partner is successful, Philips can use the results of the work

In several Mantis deliverables, the research partner and Philips cooperate on the same deliverable. Typically either one of them has the lead, and the other contributes.

Philips and the research partners will provide prototypes or pilot lines to validate the result of the research on the shaver plant industrial use case.

This project has received funding from the ECSEL Joint Undertaking under grant agreement No 662189. This Joint Undertaking receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and Spain, Finland, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands, Portugal, Italy, Austria, United Kingdom, Hungary, Slovenia, Germany.